Gates set to unveil 9/11 memorial

NEWSMAKER INTERVIEW:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was on his way to a business meeting in St. Louis seven years ago when his life was suddenly disrupted. Like thousands of other air travelers, he was diverted, and he spent three days waiting in Kansas City, Mo.

“The pilot came on and said both of the World Trade Center towers had been hit by aircraft and that every aircraft in the country was being grounded,” Mr. Gates said in an interview Wednesday.

Mr. Gates did not know at the time that Islamic extremists were behind the attacks. The horrific acts of terrorism killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon and touched off an unconventional conflict that Mr. Gates asserts is gradually being won.

When he learned the facts, his “reaction was [al Qaeda] had finally succeeded in what they tried to do in the same place in 1993. I saw it as the latest in a series of attacks against us that included the first World Trade Center [attack], Khobar Towers [in Saudi Arabia], the [USS] Cole, the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya,” he said.

“Being a historian, it seemed to me that the world was going to be very different,” Mr. Gates said. “This was one of the first successful foreign-based attacks on the continental United States with significant casualties since the War of 1812, so 189 years, and that was a big deal.”

Mr. Gates also did not imagine seven years ago that he would be called back into government service, decades after holding senior positions at the CIA and White House National Security Council.

On Thursday, he will preside at a ceremony to unveil a memorial to those who died at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into one of the western sides of the building. The crash and the fire it caused killed 125 people in the building along with 64 on the jet, including the five hijackers.

President Bush will also attend the ceremony while both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will make a rare joint appearance at New York’s ground zero.

“Tomorrow is obviously a very sober anniversary for Americans,” said White House press secretary Dana Perino. “The president thinks about 9/11 every single day when he wakes up and before he goes to bed.”

Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri remain at large, probably in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Mr. Gates said, nevertheless, that “great progress” had been made.

“The reality is, we are getting a lot of [bin Laden’s] subordinates and making it much more difficult for them to carry out operations,” he said. “What American on September 12, 2001, would have believed or even hoped or prayed that seven years later, not a single successful attack would have been carried out against the United States subsequent to September 11?”

Other key measures of progress in the war on terrorism, he said, include major increases in domestic security defenses, international cooperation and the elimination of safe havens for al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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